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<\/a>This is a really good article in Public Square Magazine<\/em>, and it\u2019s very timely: \u00a0\u201cWhen Law Meets Love: Dallin H. Oaks\u2019 ministry to sexual and gender minorities: Dallin H. Oaks pairs law with love, showing humility, outreach, and a call to hold truth with tenderness.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n And this one, an article in The Conversation<\/em> by Brittany Romanello<\/span><\/a>, a sociocultural anthropologist and ethnographer at the University of Arkansas, is also worth reading: \u201cThe new president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day<\/span> Saints will inherit a global faith far more diverse than many realize\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n And I enthusiastically recommend this fine article, written for The Dispatch<\/em> by Hal Boyd, a fellow of the Wheatley Institute at Brigham Young University and the executive editor of Deseret Magazine<\/em> who holds degrees from both BYU and Yale Law School: \u201cWhen the Latter-Day Saints Came Marching:\u00a0How the quest for religious freedom transformed a people and the nation.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n With the friend who came down with us from Utah, my wife and I attended a session today in the Los Angeles California Temple. \u00a0It\u2019s been a while since I\u2019ve done that, and I really enjoyed it. \u00a0This temple has a special family significance to me; my parents were sealed in it and my brother and I were sealed to them in it. \u00a0My wife and I visited the room in which that sealing took place. \u00a0(It was a year or two after our own wedding.) \u00a0I was able, when I was a teenager, to participate in baptisms for the dead in the Los Angeles California Temple \u2014 something that made a mighty impression on me.<\/p>\n I have long thought that the temple and the Gulag are appropriate opposing symbols.<\/p>\n The Gulag \u2014 which, for me, represents the entire class of concentration camps, labor camps, extermination camps, death camps, or whatever you wish to call them \u2014 embodies the denial that human individuals have any intrinsic value. \u00a0For Marxists, particular people are mere instantiations of classes, some of which need to be eliminated. \u00a0For the National Socialists, specific individuals were nothing but representatives of approved or disapproved ethnic groups. \u00a0Hitler, a social Darwinist<\/a>, regarded humanity as a whole as no more than \u201ca ridiculous cosmic bacterium\u201d (ein l\u00e4cherliches kosmisches Bakterium<\/em>). \u00a0For the totalitarians of the twentieth century, entire populations were to be \u201cliquidated.\u201d \u00a0And, in the Gulag and at Auschwitz and in the Ukrainian terror-famine and in the Cambodian killing fields and, for that matter, under the blade of Madame Guillotine, they were<\/em>. \u00a0Brutally and remorselessly. \u00a0Whole villages and towns were demolished, their records destroyed, their populations murdered, all human traces obliterated.<\/p>\n In stark but wonderful contrast, the temple represents a conviction that human individuals are eternal and of irreplaceable worth. \u00a0They aren\u2019t fungible. \u00a0Ordinances are performed for particular people, by name. \u00a0Not in batches. \u00a0Families aren\u2019t destroyed; they\u2019re sacralized. \u00a0We labor to preserve records of individuals and families, not to destroy them. \u00a0We do research, sometimes at considerable cost and effort, sifting through the records that remain in order to identify our ancestors and others who have passed away. \u00a0We do this so that we can act on their behalf, for their benefit. \u00a0As I\u2019ve said before, in many cases these people are being remembered, and their names are being spoken, for the first time in generations and perhaps for the first time in centuries. \u00a0(Today, I was privileged to act in the temple on behalf of an ancestor of mine, Niels Rasmussen. \u00a0He was born around 1778, in Odense, Denmark.) \u00a0This is in dramatic and holy opposition to the work of the death camps. \u00a0It is, in centrally important ways, a profoundly humanistic enterprise.<\/p>\n But here are a few chilling recent atrocities that I retrieved just today from the Christopher Hitchens Memorial \u201cHow Religion Poisons Everything\u201d File<\/em>\u2122:<\/p>\n \u201cChurch Leader Joins Second Lady of Kenya in Furthering Trees for Food Initiative:\u00a0\u201cThe best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. The second-best time is now.\u201d\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n \u201cChurch Provides Mechanized Borehole for Ghanaian School Children:\u00a0Project Provides Safe Access to Clean Water for 500 Students\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n \u201cChurch Partners with Congolese Government to Provide Support to the Victims of Flood Disaster: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints<\/a> Provides Humanitarian Support to the Victims of the June 14 Flood Disaster: A Partnership Welcomed by the Congolese Government.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n \u201cNew Computer Lab in Ghana Empowers Student Learning:\u00a0Church Collaboration with Utah-based NGO Blesses Students With Tools and Environment\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n \u201cThe Church Unites with Community to Bless School Children in Kilifi County, Kenya: The Church of Jesus Christ collaborates with government and religious leaders to furnish new facilities at a primary school in Kenya\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n \u201cGrace Ninsiima: From Poverty to BYU-Pathway Leader | Her Journey of Faith, Education & Miracles\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n \u201cOregon stake members say they had a \u2018windows of heaven\u2019 moment during community food drive: Church members and friends in the Roseburg Oregon Stake gathered 6,354 pounds of food for UCAN during their \u2018Greater Love\u2019 food drive\u2019\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n \u201cChurch Coordinates Relief Efforts After Earthquake in Cebu\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/a>